In the postmodern world where we invent reality hour by hour, depending on how we feel, being gay now includes heterosexual sex — and by far the biggest group in the “LGBTQIA+” umbrella are bisexual women in relationships with straight men. At some point, gay men will wake up and realize that they have abolished their own identity — indeed merged it into its opposite. But they have another tea dance to get to and another Instagram vacation pic to post. Most are pathetically uninformed, or programmed by tribal insecurity to follow the queering herd.
Andrew Sullivan, yet again.
The madness of being called “LGBTQ” still makes my head spin (how can I be gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender?), but stranger still is how prevalent it is among fellow gay men. Many seem to have internalized this language — this ideology — part and parcel.
And good luck saying as much out loud. I’ve been chastised, yelled at, lectured, ignored. The groupthink on this runs deep.
How did someone with a scholarly record as thin as hers — she has not written a single book, has published only 11 journal articles in the past 26 years and made no seminal contributions to her field — reach the pinnacle of American academia?
The answer, I think, is this: Where there used to be a pinnacle, there’s now a crater. It was created when the social-justice model of higher education, currently centered on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts — and heavily invested in the administrative side of the university — blew up the excellence model, centered on the ideal of intellectual merit and chiefly concerned with knowledge, discovery and the free and vigorous contest of ideas.
This resonates with my own experience in academia over the last decade. What was at first a slow drift became a sudden lurch toward the Left on so many cultural issues. Generally, that’s something I support. But with that lurch, all good sense and reason was thrown out the window.
I joined an MFA program where many people thought literature by white men, straight or not, was explicitly ‘less than.’ Where I was called a fascist for not introducing myself with pronouns, a white supremacist for merely editing a paper of a fellow student (yes!), a conservative because I argued that every person, regardless of their color and class and belief, is deserving of compassion.
Nevermind that the program chair — and his successor — were both white men. And really, really nevermind that the program chair was an admitted alcoholic known for his, um, terse and abrasive communication style. Now I’m not one to get on someone for being an asshole — pot, meet kettle — but I’m also not in charge of an academic program. (Some personality traits, believe it or not, should be disqualifying.) The performative outrage and yet complete inaction on issues of race and class is maddening. I was once told, and I’m not kidding here, that I was a “colonial apologist” because I would not give a land acknowledgement at the beginning of an in-person class, nevermind that I am leaving the land I own to the local tribe in my will.
What in the actual fuck.
What pains me most about this stuff is how much of a mockery it all makes of what I consider the most venerated institution in our culture. Academics are defined primarily by their ability to think, to make sense from nonsense, and yet they fully embraced the bullshit.
I’m as guilty as the rest — I fell for it too, at least for a while. I let my natural do-gooder tendencies take me beyond the realm of common sense. I’m both embarrassed by it and not — I really do think that much of this stuff comes from a place of good intentions — but we cannot abandon logic and reason in the name of wanting to do good. And especially not in academia.
It’s almost as though our time spent on computers has deprived us of the ability to think with nuance and forced us into these false binaries.
I have watched a strange rise in antisemitism (not mere anti-Zionism) among my leftist friends. Why? I don’t quite know, but it’s unsettling.
It wasn’t just women of color who decided that Jewish women were too domineering, too successful, too white, too obsessed with the Holocaust, and too interested in their newfound ethnic identity as a way of dominating the newly identity-conscious feminist scene. New-Age feminists believed that Judaism had killed goddess worship, and white Socialist professors equated Jews with capitalists. But Jewish women had once considered women of color to be their natural allies, and now that the feminist theories and alliances of women of color were the most influential, it was their antisemitism that Jewish feminists called out most often. Women of color resented this criticism and said that it was racist.
I’m so glad to be a gay man.
In Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory, queer scholar Heather Love wrote that queer theory’s politics “are split between the liberalism of the civil rights movement and a lumpen appetite for destruction.” This new “queer” identity destroyed identity categories themselves. Love wrote that the vagueness of the term “queer”—sort of about sexual practices, but also not—coupled with the idea that everyone understands it but you, “creates a desire to be ‘in the know.’” Like the cultural ephemera it often turns to as its intellectual objects, queer theory thrived on the transgressive frisson of the unexpected and the illegitimate.
A new Rest of World analysis shows that generative AI systems have tendencies toward bias, stereotypes, and reductionism when it comes to national identities, too.
Of course! Computers are all about broad data sets, not specific outliers.
This isn’t just AI, either. It’s in the algorithms behind Facebook and TikTok and YouTube, etc. We humans create these algorithms in our own image. Why do most YouTube “celebrities” look so similar? Why are so many female TikTok “stars” facsimiles of the Kardashians, themselves facsimiles of a standard of beauty now twenty years old?
These algorithms are built on millions of clicks, taps, scrolls, and hours watched. They’re extremely efficient at doing what old-school media has always done: flatten culture. After all, who were John Wayne and Frank Sinatra if not the embodiment — and perpetuation — of stereotypes?
What’s unnerving about social media and AI is that this flattening happens at terrific speed, which wasn’t possible in our analog culture.
Humans are not built for speed. We might be addicted to it, but our brains didn’t evolve to handle it.
…we weren’t allowed to point out the clear danger of the moment because the media decided early in the cycle that any questions about Clinton’s electability were simply a stalking horse for misogyny. The party and its loyalists insisted that it was sexist to call a spade a spade and acknowledge that Clinton had severe vulnerabilities in basic public sentiment; here’s a version from the NYT. Under the conditions of 2016, with the incumbency advantages and Trump’s unique issues, you would have wanted to elect someone who simply didn’t have the level of negative baggage that Clinton did, someone who the country generally saw as inoffensive. Yglesias nominates Martin O’Malley, but of course Bernie Sanders fit the bill as well. Sanders beat Trump in poll after poll, and cleaned up with independents, which would seem to be important in a presidential election. Clinton apparatchiks have always scoffed at those polls, asserting without evidence that Republican oppo would have sunk him without caring much that Republican oppo was already sinking Hillary.
Bernie, of course, also would have energized the youth like no other, setting up the Democrats for durable gains down the road with that demographic.
I know several people still litigating the issue. All of them, liberals to their core, insist that Hillary lost only because she was a woman.
This has never made sense to me. It starts from a place of assuming the absolute worst about people (that everyone, even fellow liberals, are complicit in misogyny) and ends with zero introspection about one’s own political biases. It’s lazy thinking.
Our status as a haven for human rights has always been dubious, a self-serving mythology that massages the ego while covering up real horror. Our closest allies can hardly boast of better behavior, even as they claim their own commitments to democracy. Such claims rest on selective memory, forms of national amnesia that ignore the bad while emphasizing only the most superficial good. In the U.S., there are few reckonings for our actions overseas, and little accountability for bad actors. Ghouls like John Yoo can author torture memos and enjoy a comfortable sinecure thereafter. Luminaries fêted Henry Kissinger for his recent 100th birthday. The U.S. rehabilitates its own worst and expects the world to acquiesce.
What, then, does America mean to the world now? People still risk their lives to come here, but the overall portrait is one of imperial decline. Though the election of Joe Biden repaired some reputational damage from the Trump years, our elderly president polls badly at home while he props up abusive regimes overseas. Congress looks little better. One party cannot govern, while the other mostly fails to check Biden’s worst foreign-policy impulses. The U.S. has extended a national culture of impunity to its friends, including Israel, and the subjugated pay the price, which is violence.
In such times, dissent takes on new importance. It serves both a pragmatic and moral function. Dissenters can remind the U.S. of the promises it makes not just to its own people but to the world. Should the powerful listen, they seize an opportunity. There is time, still, for the U.S. to do the right thing: to stabilize the damage it has inflicted on the oppressed and itself, to regain an edge over its competitors on the global stage.
Ramping up the rhetorical and social stakes leaves us incapable of calling bullshit bullshit. As is always the case, the rise of identity politics in disability discourse has created a state of constant emotionalism, threat, and fear. People are afraid to engage because they expect, correctly, that saying anything that contradicts the activist crowd will simply result in them being called bigots. This causes problems all over our debates, but appears most glaring when it comes to the stupidest issues. For example, despite dogged insistence to the contrary, it is not the case that there has been a sudden massive increase in the prevalence of late-onset Tourette’s syndrome among adolescent women with TikTok accounts. There has not been some sort of incredible change to the epidemiology of Tourette’s, and essentially no one really believes that there has been. Instead, a lot of young woman started pretending to have Tourette’s syndrome out of a desire to belong and to differentiate themselves from their peers in the marketplace of attention, and as they were rewarded in that marketplace others responded by doing the same thing. Similarly, there has not been a sudden increase in dissociative identity disorder among very-online adolescent women, given that DID is a controversial diagnosis and the disorder known for its extreme rarity. Pretending to have multiple personalities is fun and edgy so some teenagers have done it a lot recently.
Kids do dumb things and I’m not particularly mad about it. I do, however, think that if it goes unchecked this stuff could have serious negative consequences for how our culture views mental illness. What’s striking is how scared many people seem to be about calling this obvious bullshit out as obvious bullshit. When I talk about this, I press and probe and ask people if any of it passes the smell test. And just about nobody says “Yes, it’s credible that there are more authentic cases of dissociative identity disorder in my TikTok feed than there have been confirmed cases in medical history.” Nobody’s that dumb. But they’re unwilling to just say, yeah, that’s bullshit. They ummm and they uhhhh and they tiptoe around and they dance, and they do so because they’ve absorbed the attitude that criticizing anyone’s specific claims to disability means that you’re somehow callous towards disability in general. They also won’t call bullshit on bullshit because they’re afraid of being tarred with the “ableism” accusation. The whole thing makes it harder for us to think and talk intelligently about how to best accommodate disability in our society.
This resonates. In my masters program, this is all terrifically common. I’ve been afraid to call out bullshit when I see it precisely before I’m afraid of being called out as ‘callous.’ More worryingly, I’ve seen professors and administrators — at multiple universities — be cowed into silence, afraid the DEI office might come from their job should they speak out.
To say this is depressing is an understatement. Academia should be the one institution in American life immune from irrationality, from illiberalism. And yet it’s embraced them with abandon as students, now ‘customers’ in a capitalist model, have become empowered by social media.
The young, myself included, don’t always know best, and it hurts watching people that know better say nothing.
The reality of categorizing people with distinct labels has never been simple.
People with identical lineage may choose different boxes, and the same person may choose different boxes in different years. Former President Barack Obama, the son of a white woman from Kansas and a Black man from Kenya, for example, marked himself as “Black,” even when checking more than one race was an option.
Historically, some edits to census race boxes reflected changes in policy or public sentiment. As the nation’s laws on slavery shifted, the census began phasing out the counting of enslaved people and instead introduced new terms to define the Black population.
Fascinating.
I’ve long struggled with categorization, both self- and not. It’s no wonder we humans attempt to categorize (it is, after all, the basis for all language), but when we attempt to categorize another person, that’s when it all goes to hell.
Recently, the term ‘LGBTQ’ (or ‘LGBTQIA+,’ if you’re feeling radically inclusive) has come into fashion. I hate it. No, I loathe it. As a gay man, my experience has little in common with that of a trans person or someone who is “questioning.” I’m not questioning anything, so why am I grouped with those folks?
I see the LGBTQ label as insulting, created by a hetero-majority that can’t be bothered remembering the specifics of my lived experience. Instead, we’re all just thrown into this alphabet soup of ‘otherness.’
It was TikTok, in Robinson’s eyes, that was driving the sudden rise in pediatric DID referrals. “It’s possible that social media is revealing new ways for individuals with genuine DID to express themselves,” he said in his lecture. But he also issued a warning: “however, it’s also very possible that social media and internet trends are contributing to increased DID claims that are not genuine.” That is, people claiming to have DID might be mistaken, confused, or simply faking it.
Robinson — a member of McLean Hospital’s trauma research program, which delivers specialized care to people with dissociative disorders — said he could not accurately diagnose anyone through social media at the outset of his talk. Still, he used TikToks to illustrate his points. He started with a clip of a rainbow-haired DID system purchasing a personalized cake to celebrate their official DID diagnosis, something Robinson thought was “surprising,” as it contrasted with the typically “hidden” nature of the disorder. He shared footage of a system cycling through eight elaborate neon outfits — complete with wigs and cat-like paws — attributed to their different alters, “overt changes” of appearance that Robinson felt were “not characteristic” of the DID patients clinicians see each day.
Kraft — whose alters include JA, a man-hating lesbian, and Kaleb, a hat-loving teenage boy — says Robinson’s presentation was distressing to her system and the other influencers he featured, who faced waves of abuse off the back of his lecture. “I have screenshots of someone coming onto my page to tell someone they shouldn’t believe me because this doctor says I’m faking,” she says. “People were given a license to hate.”
DID creators and their fans lashed out at Robinson in response. They felt the lecture discredited their experiences and further entrenched stigma against people with the disorder. Actress AnnaLynne McCord, who came out as a DID system in 2021, called the lecture “asinine” and “crazy.” Systems began to “review bomb” McLean Hospital, where Robinson works, leaving comments on Google about the “unethical” and “disgusting’ presentation. A petition was circulated calling for a “formal apology” and “reparations” from McLean Hospital as well as a wide range of trauma experts; another petition called for Robinson’s license to be revoked.
In the end, McLean removed all videos of Robinson’s lecture from its owned channels.
I’ve long suspected that many things like this are functions of social media. My experience of human nature is that many people will do absolutely anything for attention, and what is social media if not a tool designed explicitly to garner attention? (You only once have to be in a gay bar when a bachelorette party walks in to realize people love to co-opt identities that make them feel special, and will be absolutely shameless about doing so.)
Anecdotally, this is rampant in high schools. Teachers, kids, parents… I’ve had countless of each say, “yeah, lots of girls say they’re queer or trans to get attention.” Yet no one seems to say this in public for fear of reprisal.
Our culture has lost the ability to talk in nuance, so I feel the need to explicitly say: this does not mean I think trans people or people with DID don’t exist. They do, and have a right to, just the same as all of us.
I’m merely skeptical of the numbers we currently see on or infer from social media. I resent any wing of culture that says my skepticism, a hallmark of liberalism, is somehow “hateful” or “invalidating.”
Beware of anyone that says skepticism is “hateful.” They’re trying to shut down critical thought and conversation, not encourage it.
Adults in the U.S. who regularly say hello to multiple people in their neighborhood have higher wellbeing than those who greet fewer or no neighbors. Americans’ wellbeing score increases steadily by the number of neighbors greeted, from 51.5 among those saying hello to zero neighbors to 64.1 for those greeting six neighbors.
I can attest to this. I was in a dark place the winter of 2022 when I decided to make a conscious effort to say hello to my neighbors. Changed my mindset completely.
Genetics data has revealed that the popular understanding of race, developed during a time when white supremacy was widely accepted, simply doesn’t make any sense. In the popular view, for instance, “Black” represents a single, homogenous group. But genomic data makes clear that populations in Sub-Saharan Africa are the most genetically diverse on Earth.